OCIndoor Logo Case Study

May 22nd, 2009

OCIndoor is an independent percussion ensemble from Oregon. They are national champions in their division. Their co-director Mike Stevens asked me to create an identity for the group and I felt happy and honored to do so. Here is the process that was taken to come up with the final image you see to the right.

I started with the usual brainstorming / sketching. However, since I am already very familiar with the group I didn’t stay in this stage very long. I had quite a few ideas swimming around so I really felt comfortable getting into Illustrator a little earlier than normal.

My first concept was based on strength and grit. These ideas describe such groups very well. The kids work very hard and dedicate much of their time / life to the activity. Also since it was the first year of the indoor group, I wanted to make sure that the logo didn’t portray them as amateurs. Also, another level of imagery is shown with the letter ‘I’ inside ‘C’ to show the idea of the group being indoor.

The second concept (which was the chosen concept) focuses a lot on modern and futuristic ideals. I used gradients and shadows to give the concept depth and used clean lines for that modern look. The overall impression of the logo shows an indoor arena (floor). The letter ‘C’ looks like a tenor drum mallet striking a drum. Example can be seen HERE.

Concept 3 is the one that I pulled out all the abstract imagery. When you immediately look at the logo you see “OCi”. This is true, but there are so many other things hidden inside the logo itself. The first idea you might see is the tip of a drumstick inside the letter “C”. Another thing is the 45 degree angle going into the letter ‘i’ using negative space. Inside this you can envision a bass drum mallet in playing position. If you tilt your head 90 degrees to the left you might see a person (O is the head, C is the torso and arm, i is the hand). This person has good posture and is in playing position. There are probably other things inside this concept that I haven’t even caught yet. If you see something, please let me know by leaving a comment.

They looked over the concepts and chose number 2 to move forward. From here they told me some of the things that they were concerned about. They thought that it might be good to have the web address included since “OCI” is fairly obscure and not everyone might know what it means. They also said that even though the figure above the ‘I’ looks cool, they wanted to see the Oregon Crusaders emblem there instead. So I got to work and came up with 3 revisions based on their suggestions. Revision Set 1 can be seen HERE.

We were on the right track but it didn’t quite feel right and they agreed. You couldn’t really read the web address on smaller variations of the logo. Also, they decided that they would like to have the full name “OCIndoor” instead of “OCI”. Also, they liked the idea of the compass emblem but wanted to stick to the green color scheme and use a more accurate version of it. With those ideas, I came up with 4 more revisions. Revision Set 2 can be seen HERE.

It was almost ready, but there was still some more tweaking to be had. The next versions of the logo can be shown below.

From here we thought we were done. But there was 1 thing that occured that passed by everyone until later. For some reason, the shadow effect was gone if there was a background used other than white. I had to manually add the effects using colored layers. It was a crude fix but a permanent one. Final versions of the logo can be seen below. Please support the organization by going to their website(s): OCIndoor.org and OregonCusaders.org

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